'BOWLING ALONE' NOT HELPING NATIONAL AVERAGE

Robert Putnam is the chief lodge brother of the social capital movement, which seeks to guide us into reconnecting with one another socially, fraternally, and organizationally in ways that withered in the latter half of the last century.

His new book, Bowling Alone, which grew out of his 1995 essay, is a mountainous, momentous work, diagnosing as many of the ills of our society as can be ascribed to alienation, anomie, indifference, or isolation. Which is a lot of ills.

"The collapse and revival of American community" is the subtitle to Putnam's epic survey of surveys of the sociological erosion that has helped atomize Americans one from another since the 1950s.

"My message is that we desperately need an era of civic inventiveness to create a renewed set of institutions and channels for a reinvigorated civic life that will fit the way we have come to live. Our challenge now is to reinvent the 21st-century equivalent of the Boy Scouts or the settlement house or the playground or Hadassah or the United Mine Workers or the NAACP," says Putnam, a Harvard fixture and incoming major domo of the American Political Science Association.

Putnam spews credit generously as he forages over the rangeland of study performed by an army of colleagues. And the amount of data amassed and explained is mind-boggling. For instance: What do most Americans do between dinner and bedtime? Well, 80 percent watch TV, 55 talk to the family, 42 shower or bathe, 35 snack, 30 read a newspaper (Yes!), 25 do chores, 15 read mail, and 5 walk the dog.

There's a clue there, folks: TV is the biggest part of the problem. "A major commitment to television viewing -- such as most of us have come to have -- is incompatible with a major commitment to community life," he writes.

And in a phone interview last week from New York he expanded on his theory that too much time watching TV is probably the biggest single contributor -- perhaps 25 percent of the total -- to social disintegration.

Not all TV is pernicious, he said; high-quality programming like public television's news and public affairs shows are not deleterious to social capital. But: "For the most part, entertainment television is lethal."

His text concludes with the powerfully buttressed prescription that reconnecting with friends and neighbors "will be good for us." There follows a 126-page compendium of appendices, notes and an index. He charts membership of 40 different organizations, from 4-H clubs to dentists to Red Cross, Masons, Odd Fellows, Moose, Shriners, and, yes, the Women's Bowling Congress. (The title plays off the decline in league bowling).

Using social survey data like thread, Putnam and his followers weave a fabric of stunning comprehensiveness.

He may not be right on every point. Subsequent scholarship may turn up significances he overlooked. But no one following in his footsteps will be able to ignore, go around, or simply evade Putnam. "The assiduous record keeping of thousands of club secretaries and county clerks and church treasurers across the decades is much more reliable than the frail recollections of 'how things used to be.'" No getting around that.

Putnam spent five years building and testing his seventh book's thesis, for a lot of that time holed up on Frost Pond in Jaffrey, N.H. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, stakes the mighty claim that Bowling Alone will take its place alongside two other Harvard-spawned epics, The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society.

One book delved into the American character, the other into our consuming habits. Both set the standard; they're up there as high as a reputation can get. But Putnam may just have scaled these heights. He's put his finger on an important sociological development.

"Every 10 percent of added commuting time reduces by one-tenth the amount of social interaction," Putnam told NPR. "People now watch Friends instead of having friends."

Has his research changed the lifestyle of the Putnam family (wife, two grown kids, five grandchildren)?

"I've become more aware of the need to have picnics with my family," he chuckled. The average American family used to picnic together five times a year, but that average is down to two, with women working, kids elsewhere, fathers commuting longer. "We've had three picnics in the last two weeks," said Putnam, "so singlehandedly I'm working to bring up the national average."

David Nyhan is a columnist for The Boston Globe, 135 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02107.